Peter Benson’s Assets

Peter Benson died last Sunday, October 2, 2011. He was 65 and had battled cancer for a year. Many of you may not know that Peter Benson was one of the most influential educators in the world. Many of you may not have read the books he wrote, including the pioneering What Kids Need to Succeed. Many of you may not be familiar with the organization he led for more than 25 years, Search Institute.

Let me tell you about it.

What Peter Benson did that was so significant was to shift the way educators think about young people. Rather than focusing on what’s wrong with kids and trying to “fix” them, he zeroed in on what was right with kids and tried to support them.

Search Institute identified 40 items—relationships, experiences, values, attitudes, attributes—that were correlated in the literature with student success: success in both school and in quality of life, i.e., avoiding drug use, violence, and early sexual activity. These 40 items were known as “Developmental Assets®.” It wasn’t that the assets caused success, but they were certainly associated with it: The more assets a young person had, the more likely that that young person would be successful.

The Developmental Assets are divided into 20 external assets and 20 internal assets. The external assets are in turn divided into Support (e.g., “5. Caring school climate—School provides a caring, encouraging environment”), Empowerment (e.g., “8. Youth as resources—Young people are given useful roles in the community”), Boundaries and Expectations (e.g., “11. Family boundaries—Family has clear rules and consequences, and monitors the young person’s whereabouts”), and Constructive Use of Time (e.g., “17. Creative activities—Young person spends three or more hours per week in lessons or practice in music, theater, or other arts”).

The internal assets are divided into Commitment to Learning (e.g., “21. Achievement motivation—Young person is motivated to do well in school”), Positive Values (e.g., “27. Equality and social justice—Young person places high value on promoting equality and reducing hunger and poverty”), Social Competencies (e.g., “35. Resistance skills—Young person can resist negative peer pressure and dangerous situations”), and Positive Identity (e.g., “37. Personal power—Young person feels he or she has control over ‘things that happen to me’”).

Developmental Assets (including variations of assets for different ages) form the core of hundreds of school- and community-based initiatives throughout the U.S., Canada, and in countries throughout the world. These initiatives are used in schools, school districts, organizations, homes, and businesses. Yes, businesses: Is it too far a jump to go from Asset 7, “Community values youth,” to “Company values worker”? Or how about Asset 33, “Interpersonal competence”? Or Asset 39, “Sense of purpose”?

There is no one “Developmental Assets program.” It’s not merely a matter of buying a curriculum and plugging it into a school or youth-serving organization. Developmental Assets is more of an attitude: You identify the assets and you promote them. And by “you,” I mean every contributor to the well-being of a young person’s life, whether you interact in the home, school, or community. To be sure, Search Institute has published a multitude of books (some of which I’ve written), newsletters, articles, videos, and assorted other materials to help people implement the assets, but this is not a “what”; it’s a “how”: How do you support young people? How do you incorporate families into furthering asset-producing behaviors? How do you make every teacher and every coach and every secretary and every bus driver in a school community understand that they have a potential role in every student’s maturation?

I have helped to develop programs and training designs based on Developmental Assets, in that each lesson or activity would promote—explicitly or implicitly—one or two of the assets, but people can build assets even without a program or training. Again, it’s a matter of attitude: What are a young person’s strengths? What are a young person’s sources of support? And what can you do to improve both?

This is Peter Benson’s important legacy: a way of looking at our nation’s future in terms of strengths, not deficits; a way of treating young people not as problems but as resources. When people are treated a certain way, they often come to act in that way. If you treat a teenager positively, you’ll foster a different personality than if you treat a teenager negatively or—as is too often the case—indifferently.

Does this make sense to you? Then that’s another of Peter Benson’s legacies: to formalize a way of behaving toward young people that maybe we already knew but hadn’t figured out a way to put into action.

For more information about Peter Benson and Developmental Assets, go to Search Institute’s website at www.search-institute.org.